Author(s)

Yunfeng Shi, Yuhong Xie

College of International Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.

Garden path sentence is a kind of complex sentence which may cause structural and semantic ambiguity. Psycholinguistic analysis is the conventional approach to it. This paper will survey garden path sentence via viewpoint analysis within a systemic functional linguistic frame. In another word, garden path sentence will be discussed in term of lexicogrammar, clause complex, transitivity, theme and rheme, and cohesion and their relationship with viewpoint. It is expected that this approach will help to the interpretation and disambiguation of garden path sentences. Garden path effect attributes to polysemy of lexis, syntactic structure and sentence reader’s viewpoint.

Garden Path Sentence, Viewpoint, Clause Complex, Theme, Rheme, Ambiguity

Shi, Y. and Xie, Y. (2017) Viewpoint in Garden Path Sentence: A Functional Approach. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 7, 33-40. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2017.71003.